For the last year or so I’ve been managing my friend Nir Eyal's email list, with thousands of subscribers. In the beginning we used MailChimp, and it worked pretty well. Then we decided to move to Aweber, mostly due to many glowing reviews and the fact that they allowed single-opt in (meaning that a user could add their email to the newsletter without confirming the email address). It turns out that single opt-in is a bad idea anyway.
Fast forward to the present, and the email marketing landscape has changed a lot. Not only has the product offerings evolved, but people are interacting with their inboxes in a very different way - with increased email usage on smartphones being the biggest difference. And when more and more of your subscribers are reading your emails on their phones, it’s important to send out emails that renders well on any screen size.
Over the last six months MailChimp has improved drastically - both through new features and a new dashboard, but perhaps most importantly they are the first (and currently only) major email marketing provider supporting properly responsive emails.
It might come as a shock to you that neither Aweber, GetResponse, Constant Contact, Vertical Response or iContact properly support responsive emails - even if you upload your own responsive template. After contacting Aweber support I learned that the mandatory unsubscribe links that they insert in the bottom of every email is presented within a table that breaks your responsive template. Seriously - this is 2013, not 2009, or 1999 for that matter.
I actually liked GetResponse’s interface, but they did not even support sending out RSS based campaigns with the full content of the RSS posts, only a short version with a read more link. And their mobile templates was not really responsive, so they showed up as super narrow when viewed in a desktop mail client. So they were pretty much useless as well.
So mainly because of awesome, easy to use responsive templates, I’m back with MailChimp - both with my own newsletter and in a few days also with Nir’s newsletter. The range of integrations Mailchimp offers, as well as their superior interface and demonstrated willingness to stay ahead of the curve is a nice bonus. Their lack of phone support is really not a big issue when you can use their super handy live chat instead.
So what do you think? Have you had any issues like this with your own email marketing provider?
PS: If you sign up for a paid MailChimp account using this link, you will get $30 added to your account.